09 May 2019

Sandbox – 9may19

[Trump thumping has now reached a fever pitch in Democrat, socialist, and alt-Left circles. When was the last time you heard a US president accused by political opponents of working to do away with our Constitution, democracy, free speech, and other liberties that have defined America since its founding? In our daily dose from the Democratic leadership, the media are full of emotional videos accusing President Trump of exactly that – he’s a treasonous and treacherous criminal with no morals who must be removed from office by any and all means possible in order to save our nation. Any memories of such a state of affairs? gjr]

One reason tariffs are unlikely to hurt U.S. consumers is that trade with China accounts for a very small fraction of U.S. spending. According to a recent study by an economist at the San Francisco Fed, imports make up around 11 percent of the $14.3 trillion of consumer spending in the U.S. Imports from China account for 16% of that, which translates into 1.76 percent of consumer spending.

In the "you thought the news was fake before' category--with new press pass rules that led to the recent purging of Whitehouse correspondents, the majority of reporters now covering the Whitehouse have what is called exception credentials which means that they all serve at the pleasure of press secretary Sarah Sanders because they all fail to meet credentialing requirements that state in order to get a press pass one needs to be physically present 90 or more days out of 180 or their passed are revoked which no one actually does. Basically, Sanders (trump) can pick and chose which reporters get in the door and which ones do not.

Froggy 1:26 --Obviously you give enough of a crap to post a response or is life in your cubicle so boring that you have nothing better to do? Me, I just fishing' and it seems like I catch one every time I post..

The hardened battle lines were prompted by Beijing’s decision to take a more aggressive stance in negotiations, according to the people following the talks. They said Beijing was emboldened by the perception that the U.S. was ready to compromise.
In particular, these people said, Mr. Trump’s hectoring of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to cut interest rates was seen in Beijing as evidence that the president thought the U.S. economy was more fragile than he claimed.
Beijing was further encouraged by Mr. Trump’s frequent claim of friendship with Chinese President Xi Jinping and by Mr. Trump’s praise for Chinese Vice Premier Liu He for pledging to buy more U.S. soybeans.

In other words, if tariffs go up and the trade talks fall apart, it will all be Donald Trump’s fault.

This Taylor Swift defense–“Look what you made me do”–sounds implausible. Actual economic data on the U.S. economy shows that it is very strong. The economy grew at a 3.2 percent rate in the first quarter, up from 2.2 percent at the end of 2018. Job creation has been much stronger than expected and unemployment has fallen to 3.6 percent. Inflation has been running very low, showing that tariffs on Chinese goods haven’t pinched U.S. consumers.

If creepy grampa joe makes it to be the nominee he just added another bunch of words that are going to be stuffed down his throat. It joins the statement that the chi coms are good folks and no threat or competition to the US. LOL

High schools across the country are highlighting their soon-to-be graduating students' intentions to join the military.

Similar to college or athletic "signing days" — in which high school students officially or ceremonially declare the place of higher education they've committed to — schools are increasingly hosting "military signing days."

Not even the Clinton empowered soviet wanna be's or the chi coms can prove this ability. I see your next county rocket show fat lil' kim and raise with 7600 miles and gee from both coasts or whatever we need to do!

So ya like sure that the pattern of events is not coordinated, the iraninans rocketing Israel, li'l fat kim, chi com backpaddling and the mutha mullahs giving the proxies ballistic rockets. Move along, nothing here to see here.

Robert, Steve, Andrew and Paul. How about we pull our weight and pull out of this neighborhood?

RR only benefits from the clicks we generate. Nothing is gained here from our input. We are speaking to a bunch of fossilized fence posts. Let the echoes roll on and on as the the viewer base crumbles. Few but the most jaded will spend much time at a blog with a one sided rant. We are the counterpoint that makes this place interesting. Todd, Walt, Bill and Bessie can jabber on until the cows come home, but no one gives a shit what they think.

If you want to play this experiment, Let the lab rats play with themselves and we can revisit on July 1 and see how far the clicks have plummeted. O.Z.

The lefties loved to post here all about how Trump wouldn't get elected, couldn't last a year, Russian collusion, was going to be impeached...
Turns out they were wrong and it aint fun no more having to be served crow on a daily basis.
"We are speaking to a bunch of fossilized fence posts."
Oh yeah - you lefties are so hip and cool with all the new 'ideas' such as pooping in the sidewalk, denying medical science, getting rid of civil rights.
We conservatives are mindful of truths lasting thousands of years while easily adopting into a society ever changing with the new technologies coming into play.
"We are the counterpoint that makes this place interesting."
True that. To a point.
Your writings here demonstrate how a rational person can go off the edge following slavishly to your hatred of ideas and facts that don't align with yours.
I have yet to see a single left winger posting here put up any sort of on-going debate with facts and reason.
I would be sorry to see you all go, but if this blog is triggering you, then hie off to your safe spaces and mommy will be there to comfort you with warm milk and treacle.

The BIG Lie: “If it weren’t for [Trump] being president, he’d be in prison with Michael Cohen today as individual one.” —Rep. Steven Cohen (If Trump weren’t president, this witch hunt would never have even occurred.)

Delusions of grandeur: “I hear the seas will rise. I hear we’ll lose species. I hear there’ll be more storms … [and] there will be parts of the land that will no longer be arable. I have yet to hear one international report … that says if we don’t do something about this, you and your children and your neighbors and your country and everyone you love will die! Is that what it takes?” —NPR’s Joshua Johnson

Belly laugh: “I promise you if we elect a Democrat this time — I predict to you whether it’s me or someone else — but I guarantee you if it’s me, what’s gonna happen is, we’re going to see this country come together like it hasn’t in a long time.” —Joe Biden

Non compos mentis: “The Justice Department will have to take a serious look at that.” —James Comey speculating on a post-presidency Trump indictment

(Bill’s daily favorite) .......What could possibly go wrong? “We should have a not-for-profit public option for basic banking services, and we should be piloting these projects through the U.S. Postal Service.” —Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“I’m confused. Didn’t Twitter suspend the AOC satire account?” —Ed Morrissey)

And last… “The Attorney General has offered to let Democrats view a version of the Mueller Report that is 98.5% unredacted. The only redactions are ones that are required by law. Not a single Democrat has viewed the report, yet they are holding AG Barr in contempt for following the law?” —Charlie Kirk

Ohhhh a joker gets in the clown car, this could get me to watch a socialist dem debate or two. How are they doing it, subscription service and live streamed? 23 socialist dems in any format wont play well on devices! To show solidarity with the proletariat they should have to sit on bare aluminum bleachers and wear a headset. No seat pads allowed. -

"Why I decide now, specifically the Democratic campaign, was because I see a party that is ripping itself apart. It's almost imploding because of the radicalization of its ideologies of the past few years," Horowitz said. "I think the Democratic Party is almost a warped physics and moved the gravitational center of the party so far to the left that I think it's making itself unelectable. And I don't think we're a healthy country if we have one strong party and one weak party and I think that's the road we're going down. So I want to bring some sanity to this insane process that I see going on with the Democrats."

Horowitz slammed what he referred to as "radical" policy positions Democrats have taken like on late-term abortions, open borders, and how the other Democratic candidates in the race are "running away" from capitalism, which he insisted the "vast majority of the country" oppose.

“Those same notes suggest Steele spun some wild theories to State, including one that the Russians had a “plant in DNC” and had assembled an “HRC dossier,” apparent references to the Democratic National Committee and Clinton.”.....

“Steele offered Kavalec other wild information that easily could have been debunked before the FISA application — and eventually was, in many cases, after the media reported the allegations — including that:

“Trump lawyer Michael Cohen traveled to Prague to meet with Russians;

“Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort owed the Russians $100 million and was the “go-between” from Russian President Vladimir Putin to Trump;

“The Russians secretly communicated with Trump through a computer system.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, released last month, dispelled all those wild theories while hardly mentioning Steele, except for a passing reference to his dossier being “unverified.” That’s significant, because the FISA request from October 2016 that rested heavily on Steele’s information was marked “verified application” before the FBI submitted it to the court.”

"They’re going there for mammograms...".
————
-Feminists, Celebrities Slam 'Game Of Thrones' For 'Betraying' Its Female Characters
———-
-MAJOR MEDIA STORIES IGNORE IMMIGRATION STATUS OF HIGH-PROFILE MURDERER
'Some of the articles also create an impression that Gomez was in the U.S. legally'

What Irish luck the Mrs.has. We are walking the streets of Killarney taking in the sights, and just who does she spot and run to hug? Our old Father Simon from our church who returned to Ireland 10 years ago. We were the last people he would have thought to run into here. Heck! we didn't know he was here!

It's not the first time McConnell has embraced negative labels and images that might have doomed other politicians. He acknowledged years ago that supporters of a campaign finance reform bill saw him as Darth Vader, while the bill's opponents saw him as Luke Skywalker.

Now he seems to be embracing the dark side: "I will be the 'grim reaper' in the Senate when it comes to socialist schemes that would destroy jobs, private health insurance and the free enterprise system," McConnell tweeted Wednesday.

A spokesman for the senator's campaign, Josh Holmes, said Thursday that they've received more than 1,000 orders for the shirts, and added bumper stickers to accommodate demand.

“James Comey’s planet is getting noticeably warmer. Attorney General William Barr’s emissions are the suspected cause.

Barr has made plain that he intends to examine carefully how and why Comey, as FBI director, decided that the bureau should investigate two presidential campaigns and if, in so doing, any rules or laws were broken.

In light of this, the fired former FBI director apparently has decided that photos of him on Twitter standing amid tall trees and in the middle of empty country roads, acting all metaphysical, is no longer a sufficient strategy.

No, Comey has realized, probably too late, that he has to try to counter, more directly, the narrative being set by the unsparing attorney general whose words in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee last week landed in the Trump-opposition world like holy water on Linda Blair. Shrieking heads haven’t stopped spinning since.

And so we’ve seen Comey get real busy lately. First he penned a curious op-ed in The New York Times. Then a Times reporter, with whom Comey has cooperated in the past, wrote a news article exposing an early, controversial investigative technique against the Trump campaign in an attempt to get out front and excuse it. Next, Comey is scheduled to be encouraged on a friendly cable news “town hall.”

In the op-ed, Comey trotted out his now-familiar St. James schtick, freely pronouncing on the morality of others. He sees himself as a kind of Pontiff-of-the-Potomac working his beads, but comes across more like an unraveling Captain Queeg working his ball bearings.”

Shit for brains who personally destroyed young minds and should be held accountable in a court of law for his role in the dumbing down of America sez:

“,,,white STEM terrorist shoots up school.. I thought they were supposed to be smarter than the rest of us,,,”

What do you mean “us”? Anyone walking down the street is smarter than you. In fact, those STEM students are smarter than you by a mile. They walked out when dumbshits like you tried to politicize the shooting.

“Something rather remarkable just happened in Idaho. The state legislature opted to—in essence—repeal the entire state regulatory code. . . . As a result, come July 1, some 8,200 pages of regulations containing 736 chapters of state rules will expire. Any rules the governor opts to keep will have to be implemented as emergency regulations, and the legislature will consider them anew when it returns next January.”

The swamp in the EU and londinistan is stymied and the lines are drawn and you could see a very grand coalition -

The ground may be shifting under the British political landscape as Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, already polling in first place for the upcoming European Parliament elections, has now pulled ahead of the governing Conservative Party in polls for general elections to the House of Commons.

The latest major poll of Westminster voting intentions, conducted on the 9th of May by ComRes, shows the Brexit Party up five points at 20 per cent, while the Tories under embattled prime minister Theresa May have sunk four points to 19 per cent.

The opposition Labour Party, under hard-left leader Jeremy Corbyn, is in the lead on 27 per cent, but down six points compared to its previous rating.

Trump said on Twitter on Friday that the U.S. will use its money from the tariffs to buy American agricultural products “in larger amounts than China ever did” and send it to “poor & starving countries” for humanitarian aid. The president indicated potential purchases of $15 billion from farmers. Soybean and grain futures held mostly steady after the announcements, while industry groups opposed Trump’s additional U.S. tariffs on China.

"You’re kind of burying the real story here; Sure, the spying on Trump’s campaign escalated when he secured the nomination, and took on a new urgency after he was elected, but it began BEFORE he was nominated.

We only learned of it because he did win the election. Anyone want to bet he was the only potential Republican nominee being spied on? Anyone want to bet that the only campaign subject to abuse of the intelligence services was the Presidential campaign?

Like as not, the real story here is that the Obama administration was spying on all the candidates for the Republican Presidential nomination who were seen as having any chance at all, and some unknown number of Republican Senate and House candidates, as well."

This is an excellent point! How it must gall her after running "the Best Campaign", and with the full might of the Government-Industrial complex pushing her wrinkled, useless, menopausal ass from behind and still losing to the "Game Show host".

We have learned through documents that the FBI was talking to Fusion GPS’s Christoper Steele weeks before any Investigation was opened into Russian Collusion between a low tier unpaid Trump Campaign volunteer (George Papadopoulos) and the Russians. We have learned that the intelligence that the CIA was receiving, the FBI was receiving, and the information the State Department was receiving (and passing on to the FBI and the West Wing) was all from the same confidential source: Steele. Thus we have learned that the investigation opened into George Papadopoulos was just to provide cover to justify the already on going spying on the Trump Campaign here and abroad.

We have learned that Steele solicited/approached the State Department ten days before a FISA warrant was submitted to the FISA court with the information alleging that the Russians were engaged in a spying operation on the DNC (with a mole planted in the HRC campaign) run out of Russian Consulate in Miami. This “Dossier” was stamped “VERIFIED” by one James Comey when submitted to the FISA court. We also learned that a State Department official rejected Steele’s information because there is NO Russian Consulate in Miami, roflmao. Other information Steele told the State Department official was easily disproven as well. Verified? Rightttt.

"About a year ago, President Trump withdrew the JCPOA, you'll recall. I'll bet on your television station folks were talking about how oil prices would rise, they'd spike, it would be chaos in the crude oil markets," the secretary of state told CNBC's Hadley Gamble.

"In fact," he added, "crude oil prices today are lower than they were the day that we withdrew from the JCPOA. Lower. Not higher, not radically higher, not crazy higher, not chaos — but lower."
Pompeo is correct that oil is lower now than it was on the day the U.S. withdrew from the Iran deal.

International standard Brent crude closed at $74.16 on May 8, 2018, compared with $70.62 last Friday. West Texas Intermediate stood at $69.06 last year then, but it ended at $61.66 in the latest session.

Four commercial vessels have been targeted by "sabotage operations" near territorial waters of the United Arab Emirates, its foreign ministry says.
The sabotage attempt occurred in the Gulf of Oman, the statement said, but the ministry gave no details of what form it took.

There were no injuries or deaths.
Tensions are high in the area - a crucial oil and natural gas corridor. In recent days the US has sent additional warships there.
The UAE foreign ministry called the attempted sabotage a "dangerous development" and called upon the international community to "prevent such actions" in future.
Earlier on Sunday, the government of the UAE emirate of Fujairah denied media reports that there had been blasts at its port.

The alleged sabotage comes amid rising tensions between neighbouring Iran and the US, which this week deployed warships to counter what the White House called "clear indications" of threats from Iran to its US forces in the region.

Stop the presses! The world will not end in 12 years. AOC says the World ending in 12 years was just dry humor. Like, you know, like sarcasm. Thank goodness the Apocalypse has been called of. She said it just to tweak the R fact checkers’ noses. Relax folks, nothing to see here. It was all a joke. The UN is known for its humor.

Gates, who led the Pentagon under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, said during a Sunday interview with CBS's Face the Nation he stood by statements made in his 2014 memoir that Biden had "been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades." The show's host, Margaret Brennan, looped Gates's prior comments into a broader question about whether Biden had the ability to "be an effective commander-in-chief."

"I don't know, I don't know," Gates said. "I stand by that statement. He and I agreed on some key issues in the Obama administration, we disagreed significantly on Afghanistan and some other issues."

"I think that the vice president has some issues with the military, so how he would get along with the senior military and what that relationship would be," Gates continued. "I just think it would depend on the personalities at the time."

Yet they whine about Trump. Never mind their own criminals.
"The Obama White House kept tabs on a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email accounts that the State Department improperly denied, according to newly released emails.

The emails, which were provided to Judicial Watch, show for the first time that the Obama White House was aware of the Clinton-related FOIA request, which the liberal watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) submitted to the State Department in December 2012.

The State Department denied the request in May 2013, claiming that no responsive records existed. That despite officials at the State Department, the White House and even President Obama himself knowing that Clinton used a personal email account for government business."
Think Proggy news will report it?

AVMan 1133am - It appears you have an insight as to the longer term prospects for the stock market. When viewed within a larger time window, today's pullback can't be the confirmation of any starting large scale trend that would 'screw up anyone's retirement plans'. Please share with us your deeper thoughts about the economy and the markets that gives rise to your dire prognostication.

Speaking in front of the same escalators where Trump launched his 2016 campaign, de Blasio blasted the president's rollback of Obama-era environmental policies, his move to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement and his appointment of climate change skeptics to the Cabinet."

In other words, Google picks liberal sites five times as often as ones it considers conservative. CNN.com received more than three times as many links as Foxnews.com. CNN’s traffic was nearly equally to the entire amount sent to conservative outlets.

Still think Google is fair to conservatives?

CNN tallied 10.9 percent of the total. Fox mustered 3 percent, finishing far below its cable news competitor. You know, the outlet that Fox News regularly trounces in the ratings. The rest of the top 20 included some of the biggest names in liberal media: The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, all three broadcast news networks, NPR, Huffington Post and Al Jazeera.

Train those young shooters to get them ready to be in the armed forces and have more fun!

President Trump signed legislation Friday to created broader access to funding for state-level gun range expansion and improvement.
The legislation is titled Target Practice and Marksmanship Training Support Act, but is known more simply as the Range Bill. It deals with Pittman-Robinson funds, which have been compounding from ammo and gun manufacturing excise tax revenues since 1937.

If a state wildlife agency decides to build a new recreational shooting range that cost $1 million, the state would only need to apply $100,000 of state funds to access the remaining $900,000 from Pittman-Robertson funds, instead of the $250,000 down payment currently required. It would also give states up to five years to use those funds, which is crucial when navigating the approvals for acquiring lands, permits and approvals for projects.

Don at 4:34 - Big red flags for me. Going from the Maine to the Gulf Of Tonkin Incident, we have been sucked into stupid stuff based on holes in ships that turned out to be not quite as advertised. Steady as we go, I say.

I would submit that this is different because the Israelis warned us of this and other things that were part of a packaged plan by those mutha mullahs. Hezbollah did mass rocket Israel and they warned ahead of time on this. What will be interesting if we see the rest of the warning unfold, attacks on US forces in the region.

John H. Durham, the United States attorney in Connecticut, has a history of serving as a special prosecutor investigating potential wrongdoing among national security officials, including the F.B.I.’s ties to a crime boss in Boston and accusations of C.I.A. abuses of detainees.
His inquiry is the third known investigation focused on the opening of an F.B.I. counterintelligence investigation during the 2016 presidential campaign into possible ties between Russia’s election interference and Trump associates.

A bunch of indictments in time for this coming Xmas would be a nice touch. And Chanukah!

No, dear friends, I'm not turning GOP, but Trump was kept from exercising his powers as a lawfully elected President by this massive charade and it's time for some frog-march perp dancing. If it can happen to a GOP winner it can happen to a LIB.

Rule of law and all that. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Friendly fire: “It was important that [the Peter Strzok-Lisa Page affair] be investigated and important that there be discipline that follows it, but, yeah, it made us all look bad. Peter Strzok is a very talented agent. It’s a personal tragedy for him. But as much as I care about individuals, I care about the institution more. It hurt the institution.” —James Comey

Friendly fire II: “I don’t know that we need to take the additional step of licensing every single firearm to every single owner. I think that may be too far.” —Beto O'Rourke

Hot air: “There were 400,000 apprehensions at our border with Mexico last year. As you know, many of them were kids — kids who, if they were lucky, showed up with their parents. But increasingly, we are finding that those who are arriving are farmers from Honduras who are trying to plant what used to grow but does not any longer because they, too, are in historic droughts and cannot feed themselves. If you think 400,000 is bad, wait until some countries in the Western Hemisphere can no longer support human life, because that is the direction we are headed.” —Beto O'Rourke

Tone-deaf: “The wall I worry about the most is not the president’s fantasy wall on the Mexican border that’s never going to get built anyway. What I worry about are the very real walls being put up between us as we get divided and carved up.” —Pete Buttigieg, who has no qualms about putting up a wall by vilifying Mike Pence for his Biblical views on same-sex marriage

The BIG Lie: “In their lifetime, one in five women go [to Planned Parenthood]. And most of them are going there for contraception, birth control. They’re going there for mammograms.” —Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Mammograms are not a Planned Parenthood service.)

Delusions: “If we do not secure our democracy and ensure that every vote counts in 2020, we will be having a very different conversation, possibly in Russian, in 2030.” —Stacey Abrams

Non compos mentis: “There’s a kind of a calming feeling, I always tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence, in many ways, had been wiped out… I mean, just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that [safe haven], in many ways. But they did it in a way that took their human dignity away, right? And it was forced on them.” —Rep. Rashida Tlaib

And last… “[Her claim] ignores the Jewish presence in the region and efforts to establish a Jewish state that predated the Holocaust, ignores that her ancestors allied with Hitler at the time of the Holocaust, and ignores decades of violence and terrorism directed at Israel both before, during, and after the Holocaust.” —Philip Klein
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Bonus quote

In other transgender news (no, not the transgender who shot at fellow students at the CO STEM School), medals stripped from transgender weightlifter.

“Our rules, and the basis of separating genders for competition, are based on physiological classification rather than identification.
“On the basis of all information presented to the Board of Directors for this particular case, the conclusion made, is that the correct physiological classification is male.”
“Since the lifter’s gender classification for the purpose of our rules is not consistent with female, no female records will be broken by these lifts,” Bossi concluded.

So, basically the allegation is this: To protect his son’s company and that sweet, sweet $50,000 per month salary, as vice president, Biden abused his position by threatening to kill a billion dollars in aid to one of our allies if that country’s prosecutor, who was looking into corruption surrounding Hunter’s company, was not fired.

During an appearance on Breitbart News Tonight last month, Schweizer said the prosecutor was indeed fired and pointed to reporting from The Hill’s John Solomon, who wrote that this prosecutor “told me in written answers to questions that, before he was fired as general prosecutor, he had made ‘specific plans’ for the investigation that ‘included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”

Who says it wasn’t them [the Cuban communist regime] who killed Commander Chávez to get him out of the way and leave [the leadership of Venezuela] open to the occupation of anyone who would … serve to send their riches to Cuba – not to the Cuban people, but to continue contributing to the enrichment of the same people?” Rangel asks in the video. Chávez died in 2013 of what the Venezuelan government said was advanced cancer in Havana, where he had gone for treatment.
Rangel says that he lived in Cuba for six years, which helped him “grasp the reality of all that the Cuban people live, the Cuban people who have been subjected to the yoke of the Castro-communist dictatorship for over 60 years.”

“They live in conditions of poverty that they blame on the embargo and it is false,” he says of the Cubans. “They have created a cocoon for those at the top of the Castro communist regime that does not allow the resources of the country, which are many, to trickle down to the Cuban state.”
Rangel goes on to accuse the Castro regime of using “psychoterror tactics” in Cuba “similar to what they are doing to Venezuela … they have planted in us all that psychoterror that has caused fear of participation in seeking the change we need in the people and the military.”

Rangel concludes urging Venezuelan soldiers to, like him, publicly renounce Maduro, as not doing so is a betrayal to the Venezuelan people. He cites Article 328 of the Venezuelan constitution – which he holds in the video – as the legal basis for them to no longer take orders from the dictator.

“I wish that it were less restrictive,” Smith said. “But at the same time, this is quite momentous: the abolition of single-family zoning in California.”

Sen. Nancy Skinner, a Democrat representing the East Bay Area who co-authored SB 50, said single-family zoning policies were deliberately crafted to exclude people “for economic reasons and race reasons.”

“That’s the poster child for discriminatory zoning,” Skinner said on a recent episode of “Gimme Shelter: The California Housing Crisis Podcast.”

“I love this inclusion of the fourplex because it allows us to get at some of that exclusion and gives other people the same type of access to the neighborhoods to have the great parks, the great schools, and other great assets,” she continued.

Last month, the Times wrote that Wiener “intended for his bill to push high-income neighborhoods zoned only for single-family homes to make room for apartments as redress for historical wrongs.”

California does not want to build the kind of houses that millennials want.

Contrary to reports that the recession has left Millennials disillusioned about owning a home, 75 percent believe homeownership is an important long-term goal and 73 percent see real estate as a good investment. About a quarter already own a home and 60 percent plan to purchase in the future. According to estimates, Millennials aged 25-plus account for 15 percent of new home shoppers. Lending constraints, student debt and down payments are still hurdles, but as the economy and jobs improve, substantially larger numbers of these buyers will shop for homes. Over the next five years, Millennials are expected to account for about two-thirds of new households, increasing to 21.6 million households by 2018.

[. . .]

Millennials have long been touted as the generation that prefers city over suburbs, but multiple recent studies show that city living only appeals to a small portion, from 5 to 16 percent (depending on the study), while 55 to 66 percent say they prefer the suburbs. On the other hand, younger Millennials who are renting definitely favor urban settings.

Because the generation is so large, even the small percentage opting for city dwellings — 10 percent, according to 2014 data from the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) — translates into big numbers, observes Rose Quint, NAHB’s assistant vice president of research. And if they can’t quite afford that first home, respondents to NAHB’s survey would sacrifice extra finished space or drive farther to work, schools or shops. One compromise they won’t make is on quality of materials.

Three-quarters want a single-family home. When asked about home size, 2,475 square feet is what a majority would like to have. Two-story homes (52 percent) and open concept floor plans (78 percent) were also preferences in NAHB’s research. For bedrooms, 81 percent said they wanted either three or four and two or two and a half baths would be fine. Emphasis Added

If they cannot buy one in CA, they will move to a state where they can. California is shooting in self in the foot with A-21 rack'em and stack'em zoning. The untethered generation will move to get what they want, a single family home.

He said that the group also discussed fielding the drone as a wingman to both the F-35 and F-15 no later than calendar 2022. That could mean a potential large order not long after the Valkyrie completes its planned demonstration flights this year, as Kratos said it would take about 15 to 20 months from order to delivery as it ramps up production.

The company also believes it could book an order for the Gremlins project, in which it is a major subcontractor, either this year or in 2020. Gremlins is a project launched out of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that calls for a swarm of small, reusable drones that can be launched midair from a C-130 air transport.

Social events captured on Weissmann’s calendar include birthday parties that seemed to be planned monthly, but took place less often as work bore down on the office last year. The calendar also shows the office favored “potluck” meals for holidays, including a “progressive potluck” holiday party on Dec. 13, 2017.

The current ramping up of U.S. military posturing against Iran was triggered by U.S. intelligence that showed Tehran-backed militias in Iraq moving rockets to locations that could hit bases where American troops are positioned in the nation, according to sources familiar with the intelligence.
Trump administration officials have said the Pentagon’s bumping up of the deployment last week of a U.S. aircraft carrier and bomber group to the region was justified by intelligence on threats of a potentially imminent attack by Iran on U.S. interests in Iraq, but have provided no specific details publicly.

However, a report on Wednesday said Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s surprise trip to Iraq earlier this month came after U.S. intelligence had picked up communications related to the movement of rockets in Iraq by Iran-backed militias there.

Mr. Pompeo told top Iraqi military officials during a sudden visit to Baghdad on May 7 that Iraqi forces needed to keep the Iran-backed militias in check, according to the report by Reuters, which cited two Iraqi security sources as saying the secretary of state warned that Washington would respond with force if the militias weren’t contained.

“The message from the Americans was clear. They wanted guarantees that Iraq would stop those groups threatening U.S. interests,” a senior Iraqi military source with knowledge of Pompeo’s trip said, according to the report. “They said if the U.S. were attacked on Iraqi soil, it would take action to defend itself without coordinating with Baghdad.”